Britain’s important Commission of Inquiry

Those of you who are close observers of UK affairs will already know that the Hutton Commission, whose mandate is “urgently to conduct an investigation into the circumstances surrounding [the recent death of British WMD expert Dr. David Kelly]”, has a well-organized and informative website.
The Commission’s staff manages to get the transcripts of each day’s hearings up onto the site within hours, and they are also putting up all the key pieces of documentary evidence as PDF files. Thursday, all relevant sub-poenaed documents that have not already been introduced as evidence will be put up onto the site in a batch.
I had a fascinating time last night, as I cruised the site reading internal memoes between Blair spinmeister Alistair Campbell and other cabinet and civil-service employees about the production of last September’s “dodgy dossier”…
My main impression to date is that, in the the UK as in the US, the political leaders first determined what they wanted to see presented as the “facts” regarding Iraq’s still oh-so-eulsive WMDs, and then told their intel people to go and find any evidence they could that would “support” those “facts”.
Then, when the inevitable questions arose about the quality of that evidence–as happened in London much faster than in Washington– the pols worked hard to bring the intel bosses into line with the views that (1) they had always thought the “evidence” was sound at the time it was presented to the public, and (2) there had never been any political tampering with the sanctity of the intelligence-assessment process.
Hence these sad spectacles of George Tenet being brought into line by the Prez here in the States, and a similar process occurring in the UK.
Of course, the long-term implications of all this for the integrity and morale of the professional intelligence-analysis apparatuses in these two countries are quite horrifying to think about.